Mary Ellen Stitt is a sociologist who studies the state's governance of mental illness and substance use. She is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. 

Her book Trial by Treatment: Punishing Illness in an Age of Criminal Legal Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2025) draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and administrative and experimental-survey data to document the unexpected impacts of treatment-based alternatives to traditional criminal punishment. 

She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and is a former ABF/NSF Doctoral Fellow in Law & Inequality and Fulbright Scholar. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Punishment & Society, Social Forces, and Social Problems and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network & Arnold Foundation, and P.E.O. International, among others. It has received awards from the American Sociological Association's Sections on the Sociology of Law; Crime, Law, and Deviance; and the Sociology of Mental Health. 

She can be contacted at mstitt@albany.edu.